I read a lot. This is what I think about what I've been reading.

SPIDER TRAP by Barry Maitland

I have been working my way through Maitland’s Brock and Kolla series. OK, ‘working’ is surely not the right word. ‘Reading’ would be better. Reading my way through the series. I have really been enjoying this series and still have four more to go. Goodie.

This book’s basic theme was about the Jamaican immigrants of the 80’s to London and other parts of England. They were called Yardies, and a number of them escaped horrible conditions in Jamaica and were able to create much better lives for themselves. Others found a more criminal way to survive, bringing in drugs, and setting up criminal headquarters in some areas.

In this book, two teenage girls are found in an abandoned building, shot through the head, execution-style. Meanwhile, a schoolboy, looking down from his nearby classroom can see into a vacant railroad field which is totally secured and in accessible behind Cockpit Lane, a poor and largely black area of inner south London, watching a couple of foxes. He determines to get into that yard and see what he can find. What he finds is a human jawbone, triggering a police investigation which then reveals the skeletal remains of three bodies.

Brock and Kolla’s investigation leads to the Roach family, local crime lords going back to that time decades ago, and Spider Roach is the head nasty. His sons today seem to operate legitimate businesses today, but is that only on the surface?

Kathy meets up again with Special Branches operative Tom, who starts to work on the case with them. Their main lead is a local Member who immigrated from Jamaica in his teens and has gone on to be a prominent citizen.

I found this book just a little bit less enjoyable than the others, because perhaps it concerned crimes decades old, the two teen girls were drug-using problem people who were always in trouble, and had no family to be pushing for their deaths to be solved. It was a lot more political in the workings of the various law enforcement departments, perhaps a little less personal. Nevertheless, it was still a great detective story.